#15: The Bardo

In Tibetan Buddhism, The Bardo is the place where souls go between death and re-birth. A liminal state where one undertakes karmic trials that are generated from one’s life on earth. How the participant confronts those trails dictates the quality of life they will be reborn into. For the properly prepared, The Bardo offers a great opportunity for transformation and rebirth. It is a realm of myth and symbolic meaning, where ‘real time’ is suspended and one may experience a more profound sense of reality. Colloquially, a journey through The Bardo is synonymous with a period of transition or change in one’s life.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how I can create some kind of immersive and interactive experience that uses helps people to explore their inner world using myth, archetypes and storytelling. Something I am calling The Bardo

I would start with a chat about their lives, some kind of warm-up, perhaps they pick out some meaningful archetypes that resonate with them.
People they’ve been, ways that they have been stuck, their trials, their goals, people they want to become.

Then they climb into a space, it’s like a descent into the under world, or their inner world, a journey into a liminal space.
Perhaps it is one space that somehow changes around them.
Or perhaps they have to journey through a series of different spaces.
Perhaps they have to follow the thread, a literal thread that resembles their journey or the passage of their thoughts.
Perhaps they have to figure out how to find their way through, like a puzzle, or an escape room, but more beautiful, like being trapped in a poem.

I think I would probably be there with them, guiding them through it and maybe animating the space around them somehow. Like Virgil guiding Dante.

Perhaps it’s like one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ stories, where you had to make decisions for the character that affects their journey. But the story is their own. There could be a set amount of paths through the journey, based around different archetypes.

The process would encourage the participant to be conscious of the story they had been living by, what kind of archetypes have been dominating their narrative. Have these stories been helpful?
It would empower the participant to consider, if they could change the story, change their character, what would they choose instead?
It would invite them to view the world through eyes of myth, to awaken a sense of wonder, to rekindle their magical instinct.
It would provide them with a map to the constellations of myth that have been guiding their path.
It would give them hope that their suffering had meaning, that it was a stage on their mythical journey towards a higher self.
It would frame the trails of their life in the context of a wider narrative, the telling of which is within their control.
It would help people learn to tell their own story well.